When 2 people talk using the phone, each one of them need a phone in order to do so. The phones take care of the signals (format and/or protocol) that the phone use to transmit voice. But what happen if one the person has VoIP (voice over IP) that is digital signal and the other person regulart analog line!.

Well then they need a device between them that will understand both signaling in order to change from analog to digital and viceversa.

So, if you have a device that transmit HD signal, you will need at the other end a device that understand HD signal and then pass it to a TV, LCD, Etc.

The cable (ethernet) i just a medium through wich the signal is being transfer, HD can be transmited over the air also.

You just need to have the end devices to understand each other, the media could be cable or air does not matter.

What noone seems to have pointed out yet is that there is currently no way to capture a HD signal into a computer. If you have a hd tuner card in the server which can recieve HD signals either over the air or via cable or satellite then you can stream it over your network to other pcs to play out via HDMI onto your televisions in Hidh Def quality. However you cannot currently get a HD DVD player or a SKY HD box and connect the HDMI out to your server and stream this round the house.

In the UK and I believe Ireland too getting HD content into a system is not easy. There is no over the air(Terrestrial digital tv through aerial) HD content being broadcasted at present. You can get some channels from sky or cable. The technology is there to pipe these straight through a card into your pc, however you can only recieve the Free channels and not payTV as there is no legal way to decrypt these even with a proper paid card. There are ways of doing this but are not technically 100% legal so cannot be discussed in this forum.

Thank you fibres,That was actually something I had not really got to yet but had figured that it was going to be that way.

For development purposes do you know where information may be got on get it to work? So that one could test the functionality.

Back to what i had originally ask.What i appear to be getting from you all is that; if you have a HDMI source, you can put this into a PC convert to digital, send over a normal LAN, and convert back to HDMI at the other end?

Does anybody out there know what kind of bandwidth this would use? I know how long a string is! but just in a generic simple one way set up.

Fibres,You are in the UK or Ireland, or are you a learned man or woman who knows about the set up in these locations?If you are from my end of the world and are using LinuxMCE could you tell me how difficult it was to set up with our systems? Any things I should look out for?

1) HDMI capture is possible with the blackmagic card but no linux drivers exist and are not likely to exist in the near future.2) Once captured it needs to be compressed into a form that the network can handle- preferably MPEG2 (H.264 isn't supported in the video hardware so its difficult to play) This is very processor intensive since the chips to do it aren't yet available.

Its possible to move raw HDMI over the network but not available commercially.

Not sure about the bandwidth requirements of this as I dont have a system running streaming over a network as yet. I am hoping to get this going shortly. I am still farily new to this whole thing but getting further by the day.

Yes I am from UK not ireland but I believe our systems are pretty similar especially where satellite is concerned I belive you get an irish version of UK SKY tv.

Contact me on MSN if you wish to discuss anything my email address is on my profile.

I'm completely new to this stuff and as your information pointed out you can't actually send HDMI over a 10/100 LAN without a lot of compression and encoding/decoding at each end.This is what I was wondering day one but I was not making myself clear.Thanks for your input.

Do you know how I could spec a client that would be in a position to decode the MPEG2 HD you refer to below?Again I know this is a really vague question but could you tell me if a thin client would be capable of it or would you actually need the whole graphic card/processor/ram etc. of a standard PC?Where could I find out this sort of information?

Fibre, thanks for that I’ll be in contact!

What I’m trying to design is a Home Automation/Life Style Networking system for my home, yet to be built.

It will have a media streaming network for both video and audio, lighting control, HVAC, security and home automation.I would like to be first and foremost my home (wife and kids god blessing), a home business centre for me and the wife and a show case home for the technology of my business.

By the way I’m a dreamer, I haven’t set up the business yet but I do have a fiancé!

All,Just so people know where I’m going from:I'm attempting to embark on a project of my own which will involve LMCE and my new home (yet to be built).I want to get everything designed and detailed before anything starts with the house.This way I can actually get a good quote for things; have buying power when it comes to suppliers and hopefully save a few quid!Also it will make for one great web site/rss feed during the whole thing!

I plan on doing a full design review which will look at all options available to a new home; Home Automation, Life Style Networking, Renewable Energy, A rated Home design etc…Some of this types of system will get installed but others won’t be implemented depending on the design review which will determine weather or not a feature is Critical, Major, Minor, or just a “Nice to Have”!

LMCE from an initial review appears to be a better solution than some of the other options out there, but I’m still looking.

I’m in the process of putting the initial requirements documents for the house together. This will hopefully help point me in the right direction for searching for vendors/suppliers and systems/features which I need/don’t need.

Just in case people start asking me this home probably won’t start construction till about ~2009/2010!I’m really going to go to town on the planning and design but before someone says it, I know that the day of ground works the plan will go out the window!

Thanks for you time and I hope you all will be able to take part in any of the threads I start up here.

If you wait 6 months the options change. Two years is a lifetime in this game. That said, right now there is no way to get the full feature set without a full media director (PC). However in the next 6 months a new generation of media adapters will become available, and if we can get access to the SDK somehow, it will be possible to run the whole thing in something like a Sigma 8634 client (except some features the client doesn't support). I would much prefer this solution as well. The video is much better and the power consumption is much smaller. However I have heard that some companies are looking at moving to an X86 solution to replace those clients.

Yea,I’m fully aware of that also, but I the features you want won't really change.The options technology options available will develop not change, in two year time anything new will be too new and not standard.This is why I'm looking at things like Linux for MCE.In two years time there will be a lot more than one developer registered on sourceforge with this project and, I would hope, there'll be a lot more than just 3 distro’s registered under the media centre distro category!

Some of the key things I’m after discovering from this exercise is that:One central server with thin clients appears to be the way to go.10 Gig Fibre networking will mean that very little processing will be needed at the client side, in the key rooms in the house which would need HDMI type media,In another 5 yrs time there may not be a need for the server as it may just stream straight from the net,The thin clients of today will be the PDA of tomorrow so a lot of the thin client may be built into each device, as in the TV will come with a network connection ready to be assigned an IP address.Wireless is getting much bigger each year so maybe a fat client using something like p2p to share media across the network will also be an option,Power for your computing needs will be separate from the house hold appliances as these could be one a separate line which would be connected to a low voltage alternative power supply,

P.S. Home automation is still up in the air, this is the only one which is not getting the dregs from industry!This is misfortunate for us! Industry is way ahead on the automation front but its not getting stripped down and spread around the domestic markets, too much profit in it! If people started getting SCADA and Delta-V systems in there homes industry would demand an upgrade to their own or else a price slash!